Swoopers
write...quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way.
Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is
just plain awful or doesn't work. Bashers go one sentence at a time,
getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they're
done they're done.

When it comes
to composition, Ive always been a swooper. I get the first
draft out of the way as quickly as possible so I can get to my
favorite part: editing. For me, editing is more than just tidying up;
its a process of gradually discovering the music I want to hear
and determining how best to notate it. I imagine hearing what
Ive written, then critique and revise it, then imagine hearing
the new version, then critique and revise it again, and on and on
until Im satisfied. The final score often bears little
resemblance to the first draft.

Many
performers do something similar when they practice. In the initial
swoop, they focus on basic technical mastery of a score. Then comes
the editing: they play the piece or a small passage from the piece
over and over again, each time critiquing their interpretation and
revising their approach.

And even
listeners can be swoopers. As they listen to a piece of music for the
first time, they quickly develop ideas about what they are hearing
 whether those ideas be subconscious expectations of what is to
come or full-blown theories explaining their experience as a
listener. And as they continue to hear the piece, or as they hear it
again, or as they remember hearing it, they continually evaluate and
revise those ideas.

All three of
these editing processes are feedback loops:
transformation over many stages of listening, critique, and revision.
They usually operate independently of each other, even though they
are all linked to the same piece of music  like three ice
skaters each circling a rink on a different day.

This
independence is often inevitable. Imagine, for example, that you are
listening to an old historical recording of a Beethoven symphony. The
composer wrote the score, then
the performers interpreted the score, then
you reacted to the performance. There is no way that your activities
as a listener could influence the composition or the performance to
which you are listening.

But now,
imagine that you are sitting in a concert hall, listening to the
world premiere of a new orchestra piece. The composer, the
performers, and the listeners are all sitting in the hall together,
but their activities are still largely independent. The composer
probably finished the score weeks or months before the concert; the
performers rehearsed it beforehand as well. Its mostly just
you, along with the rest of the audience, who is actively developing
ideas about the music as you hear it for the first time.

You do get a
chance to respond to the orchestra and the composer, applauding them
and perhaps even talking to them, but these opportunities come too
late to affect the performance or the score. Short of an errant cough
or cell phone ring or a riot, the musicians neither see nor hear you
as they perform: the audience sits quietly in darkness, and the
players focus their attention on the conductor, who has his back
turned toward you.

John Cage put
it this way: Composings one thing, performings
another, listenings a third. What can they have to do with each other?

There is
nothing inherently wrong with this paradigm. But when I attend
orchestral concerts, I always feel that Ive witnessed
something
great, not that Ive been
a partof
something great; its more like watching a movie at the theater
than like cheering for the home team at a sports stadium.

So
when the ACO asked me to write a new piece for Orchestra Underground
 a series whose mission is to challenge conventional
notions about symphonic music and the concert experience itself
 I wanted to create a work which would facilitate interaction
among composer, performers, and listeners during
the performance. Audience input would immediately affect the score
and its interpretation. The composer, performers, and listeners would
all still have their own little feedback loops, but now there would
also be a giant feedback loop that connected them all together.

In many of my
recent works, I have found technology to be a powerful tool for
facilitating this kind of collaboration. Instead of composing a
conventional score, I develop computer software which plays the role
of the composer, generating music according to my own instructions
and the activities of others. In many of these works, Ive
dispensed with conventional performing ensembles and performance
venues altogether in favor of web sites, installations, or even
toll-free telephone numbers. Performers and listeners merge into a
single group of users who interact with the software to
help create the music they hear.

But with Glimmer,
my new piece for ACO, I had to work within a more traditional
context. The orchestra remains on stage, the audience remains in
their seats. And I did not want to merely turn the audience into
additional performers; I wanted them to influence rather than
directly create the sounds they heard  the chorus of Greek
theater more than the chorus of Messiah Sing-Ins.

The result is
a giant feedback loop which complements traditional aural lines of
communication with visual ones. The musicians communicate to the
audience through sound, just as they always do. The audience then
communicates to the composer (or rather to the compositions
software) by turning light sticks on and off over the course of the
performance; their actions are captured by video cameras and analyzed
by the software. Then, the software communicates to the performers by
changing the colors of lights mounted on each players music
stand, sending them instructions about what to play. Everyone is
connected  performers to listeners to composer back to
performers  and the giant feedback loop is complete.

There is a
contradiction lurking here. As a composer, I am obsessed with editing
my music, but with a piece such as Glimmer,
I have given up a tremendous amount of control. After a certain
point, it becomes impossible to imagine hearing the music I have
written, since I cannot predict how listeners and performers will
realize it. My own efforts at editing eventually hit a brick wall.

But actually,
such a wall always exists. There is a gap, even with the most
conventional of compositions, between the performance which I can
imagine in my head as I edit and the performance which ultimately
takes place in the real world. This gap can be bridged in part by
training and experience, but I can never predict exactly how
performers will interpret the score I write. Nor would I want to.
Every performer brings a new perspective to a work, and that can lead
to unexpected but often wonderful things.

In Glimmer,
I simply hit the wall sooner than usual. I cannot even predict the
notes which will be played, or the order in which they will be
played, or the times at which various sections of the orchestra will
play. I have given up fine-level control and instead defined a
process and created a general structure. By doing so, I hope that
interesting and maybe even wonderful things will emerge at the
performance, things which I never could have predicted or imagined myself.

Glimmer is
not a protest against current orchestral performance conventions. It
is not a vision for the symphony hall of the future. It is not a
marketing gimmick to draw younger audiences to classical music. It is
merely an experiment in reshuffling the roles of composer, performer,
and listener a little bit, so that they can have something more to do
with each other, so that they can all be a part of the same moment.
We are sitting in a room  together  so why not?